Thank You Apple For Rejecting My App

One way I cling to the notion that I still know something about physics is to create oddball mobile physics apps. Since this is a side-project my goal is to spend most of the time on physics and less on the time-intensive UI tuning. I have moved to Unity and while learning Unity I decided to try and make a mobile game inspired by a spinning magnet office toy I had had for years.

When I look at something like this I wonder what might happen if I could change the number of arms, number of “propellers” and a game/simulation seems like a good way to explore these ideas.

In my initial enthusiasm for Spinor I decided that adding leaderboards would be a good idea. It would encourage people to share their love of my awesome game and take me on the road to self-sufficiency as an indie developer. This meant that I needed to add code to track login state and provide options on the level select screen and game over screen. I found a way to spooge it in. What I had was “workable” and I went ahead and started to submit Spinor for Android, BB10 and iOS.

Google will take pretty much anything. Within hours my app was up on Google Play.

Amazon approved it.

Blackberry approved it.

Apple rejected it.

They rejected it on the basis that the level select and game over screens were “too ugly”.

They were right.
The level select screen was one of those things that is not the fun part of developing the app, and I had just plopped in some touchable tiles and some hacky strings using the Unity OnGUI() approach. It *was* ugly. I then decided this was a great time to search the Unity asset store. I quickly discovered the Mad Level Manager and decided to grab it when it went on sale. The end result is a cleaner looking game that is more presentable.

The chaos of magnetically interacting systems *is* cool – and I enjoyed watching some of the odd interactions that result.

Next time I’ll be submitting to Apple FIRST. They give the best feedback.

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4 thoughts on “Thank You Apple For Rejecting My App”

It still barely makes it into the ‘non ugly’ category. I’m happy that Apple keeps an eye on the store and doesn’t allow it to become a huge dump of crap like the play store. Congratulations regardless, keep going.